


Sunset

by ColiOli



Category: The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-22
Updated: 2017-11-22
Packaged: 2019-02-05 12:15:48
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 678
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12794355
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ColiOli/pseuds/ColiOli
Summary: Jesus has been working on opening up to Daryl. He shares with Daryl how he believes people can change despite their past.(In response to 8.03)





	Sunset

**Author's Note:**

> There is potential for trigger warnings of self-harm by both characters in this work. It's not detailed nor graphic, but hinted at.

It wasn’t the faded line of the sun across the horizon that pierced Paul’s eyes that evening. Unsettled breaths shook his core –his features smothered by the drapes of hair falling over his face. His back was perched right up against the wood pillars that had been slammed together to form the wall around the Hilltop.

It wasn’t the steps of Daryl approaching him that shook his core that evening.

Cigarette smoke blows across the sky following behind Daryl as the hunter steps near to the lone man. “You sure know how to start some drama.”

Paul raises his head to meet the looming gaze of Daryl’s.

No, it wasn’t the sun peeking behind the tree-line that pierced his eyes just now.

Daryl drops the smoldering butt to the ground and smashes it with his foot as smoke escapes the corner of his mouth. He sits next to Paul, pressing his back against the fence with his arms resting on blood-stained knees. He smells of smoke and death.

Paul can’t shake the feeling that Daryl’s here to tell him the same as everyone else’s words have been –echoing over and over in his head.

“We’re not the killers.”

“We ain’ the dumb ones neither.”

Paul closes his eyes. When he opens them, he looks to Daryl’s hands that are held by limp wrists across his upright knees. From the corner of his eyes he scans the hands that had taken a life today. Bloodied –from his own and likely others. Across his knuckles are jagged lines and Paul imagines a macabre scene of what made them that way. Paul finds himself eyeing those marks until he spots something different from the expected.

A keloid scar rests on the fleshy bed between his thumb and knuckles. It’s nearly a perfect circle—the same size as the smashed cigarette butt that sits between their two bodies.

“Those people –they have been through the same obstacles as we have. They made choices that maybe weren’t them—but survival itself is the one doing the talking.”

“They don’t deserve a chance to do em’ again.”

Paul wore-long sleeves for a reason whenever possible. The sleeve of his forearm had fallen, and with his green eyes, Paul traced the thin scars that lined his arm.

“People can change.”

“You don’t know the kind of people that them shit holes are. They ain’ the ones who do reflectin’ and then re-think their fucked-up lives.”

“You don’t think I’ve been around those kinds of people either?”

“They ain’ exactly from yer college-kid lifestyle.”

Paul scoffs. “What ‘college-kid lifestyle’? I was raised in homes with men just like them who did anything just to make the day go by easier.”

Paul catches Daryl starring at the same lines on his arms that Paul had drifted off on for far too long.

Paul pulls down the sleeves, catching Daryl turn away as he does so. “Just because you were stuck somewhere once, doesn’t mean you won’t be able to get away from it.”

In between the silence, Daryl picks at a blade of grass and splits its center with his thumbnail.

“There’s a lot you don’t know about me, Daryl. One day you will.” Paul sighs, his eyes suddenly heavy. “But I don’t want to talk about it anymore.” He drifts off back to the place where he imagines a line of people waiting for their execution.

His thoughts are interrupted when an arm wraps around his waist. It pulls him in closer and a hand finds its place around the curve of his side. He leans into the embrace and allows his weary head to drop to a firm shoulder.

“Don’t talk ‘bout it. We’ll deal with shit when the time comes.”

One day things would change. But if Paul could capture and hold onto the way things were right now in this very moment -with the sunset piercing his eyes and weak rays of light touching his skin, his lover pulling him in close-, those are the things he’d want to keep the same forever.

 

 

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> I kind of have a focused idea on Paul's past that I could potentially elaborate on with future works. I started to open up to that idea of his past in this fiction without going into detail about it saving that for perhaps the next work. There's a lot of mystery to his character on how he developed to be so calm despite having a cloudy childhood.


End file.
